Gated Coordination for Efficient Multi-Agent Collaboration in Minecraft Game

TL;DR

This paper introduces a gated coordination mechanism and partitioned information architecture for multi-agent systems in Minecraft, enhancing efficiency by reducing unnecessary communication and improving task performance.

Contribution

It presents a novel architecture and mechanisms for selective communication in multi-agent systems, addressing coordination noise and overcommunication issues.

Findings

Improved blueprint completion quality in long-term construction tasks.

Reduced ineffective escalations and increased communication utility.

Enhanced local self-recovery and task execution efficiency.

Abstract

In long-horizon open-world multi-agent systems, existing methods often treat local anomalies as automatic triggers for communication. This default design introduces coordination noise, interrupts local execution, and overuses public interaction in cases that could be resolved locally. To address this issue, we propose a partitioned information architecture for MLLM agents that explicitly separates private execution states from public coordination states. Building on this design, we introduce two key mechanisms. First, we develop an event-triggered working memory based on system-verified outcomes to maintain compact and low-noise local state representations. Second, we propose a cost-sensitive gated escalation mechanism that determines whether cross-region communication should be initiated by jointly considering node criticality, local recovery cost, and downstream task impact. In this way, communication is transformed from a default reaction into a selective decision. Experiments conducted on long-term construction tasks in open environments demonstrate that, compared to baseline models based on strong communication and planned structures, the introduction of gated communication and a partitioned information architecture results in superior performance in terms of blueprint completion quality and execution chain length. It also improves local self-recovery, reduces ineffective escalations, and increases the utility of public communication.